My colleagues and I understand this very well. In his book Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations (Ifsr International Series on Systems Science & Engineering, Vol 1) Robert Rosen explains the way sensory input is processed in the human brain. Quite simply, the input is useless without a pre-existing memory base to use in processing it. Lakoff has done much to explore this idea and the results are clear and consistent. He speaks of these memories as the basis for "frames". He goes on to explain how they are activated during discourse and discussion:
Words activate frames. That's why words are so important. A single word can activate not only the defining frame, but also the system its defining frame is in. The system of frames has, at the top, moral frames, so if you make any proposal that is social or political, the assumption is that you're doing it because it's "right". Anything below the hierarchy activates everything at the top of the frame. Since political ideologies are characterized by systems of frames, ideological language activates the ideological system....
You win by using your own frame. If you are asked, "Are you in favor of tax relief?" while being interviewed on Fox News, don't reinforce their frame in your response. You instead say, "I'm in favor of having the public jointly get together an provide public education and health."
So don't challenge the opposition in their language. Tell a new story instead.
Whatever you do, don't try to dismantle common myths about such and such with a rational argument. It's worse than ineffective. It's shooting yourself in the foot because in stating their frame, you reinforce it.
He goes on to discuss sustainability and how to frame the issues it entails. He then says this about what we can do to better communicate complex problems to the public without losing their attention:
Understand that there are two kinds of causation: direct and systemic. Every language in the world has direct causation in its grammar; no language has systemic causation in its grammar. Climate scientists are the worst offenders because they understand and use systemic causation at work, but in communication they think that "causation" means direct causation. This has nothing to do with their talent or how articulate they are. They just don't know basic cognitive science.
Here's a story. I'm at the Aspen Institute in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Gore and Kerry are there, but the smartest guy in the room is Ronald Reagan's chief strategist, who was partly progressive on environmental issues. Anyway, the scientist gets up there and gives an excellent science lecture. A reporter asks him, "Did global warming cause Hurricane Katrina?" A scientist cannot say that there was direct causation, but what he should have done was explain the chain of events and then string it together to show how Hurricane Katrina was systemically caused by global warming. You have to connect the dots for your audience.
I have many diaries here that explain the difference between systemic and direct causation and will be writing more. This difference is crucial in making sure we don't just hand the debate to the opposition.
We are going to be doing a lot of debating before November. It is important that we do not shoot ourselves in the foot again.
Comments are closed on this story.